Reprising their characters from the hit series, "Mad Men," actors Vincent Kartheiser and Rich Sommer have teamed up with U.S. PIRG and Funny Or Die to voice their support for high-speed rail in America.

Reconnecting America CEO John Robert Smith will be visiting various cities in Montana to talk about the need for a small town and rural transportation policy. He will be meeting with local elected officials, community groups and planners. Smith will be in Billings on Sept. 21, Bozeman/Belgrade on Sept. 22, Helena on Sept. 23 and Missoula on Sept. 24. The Yellowstone Public Radio in Billings, Montana, offered this: Strategic investments in transportation by local governments can revitalize communities, says the former mayor of Meridian, Mississippi. John Robert Smith is now co-chair of the group Transportation For America. He will be in Montana this week to talk to officials and others about how he transformed a derelict portion of his downtown into a vibrant center for commerce, housing, and the arts. YPR is part of a multi-station public radio reporting project looking at the issue of transportation. Funding for the Transportation Nation project comes from the Rockefeller…

John Robert Smith, CEO of Reconnecting America and co-chair of Transportation For America, discusses why he left his hometown of Meridian, MS, where he grew up in the house his grandfather built, a home he had lived in all of his life, to come to DC and work on reforming our country's federal transportation program.

The nation's leading forum dedicated to advancing urbanism and promoting alternatives to sprawl was held in Denver this June and among the presentations at the Congress for New Urbanism's annual convention was a New Urbanism 202 seminar entitled "Implementation Strategies For Transit-Oriented Development."

In this video, recorded at a national streetcar workshop in Los Angeles last year, Scott Bernstein, president of the Center for Neighborhood Technology, talks about why affordability isn’t just about housing costs anymore: In the early 1920s when every US city of more than 5,000 residents had at least one streetcar line, households spent an average of just 3 percent of household income on transportation. Today families spend an average of 19 percent.

In this 17-minute video, Michael Powell of Powell’s Books talks about why he led the effort to convince property owners in Portland’s Pearl District to tax themselves to build a streetcar line, and what that streetcar has done for economic development in Portland. He calculates the benefits this way: The number of pedestrians in the crosswalk in front of his store numbered three an hour before the line opened in 2001, he says, but when he counted again in 2008 there were 938 pedestrians. Meantime, 400 new businesses opened in the Pearl, 90 percent of which are locally owned – the vast majority by women and minority entrepreneurs. In the meantime, property values have increased more than tenfold.

In this 17-minute video, Michael Powell of Powell’s Books talks about why he led the effort to convince property owners in Portland’s Pearl District to tax themselves to build a streetcar line, and what that streetcar has done for economic development in Portland. He calculates the benefits this way: The number of pedestrians in the crosswalk in front of his store numbered three an hour before the line opened in 2001, he says, but when he counted again in 2008 there were 938 pedestrians. Meantime, 400 new businesses opened in the Pearl, 90 percent of which are locally owned – the vast majority by women and minority entrepreneurs. In the meantime, property values have increased more than tenfold.

Robin Kniech, Program Director of FRESC: Good Jobs, Strong Communities in Denver, Colorado, presents on Mass Transit, Transit Oriented Development, and the Opportunity for Community Benefits. The presentation was originally delivered at the February 2009 Good Jobs, Green Jobs Conference in Washington, D.C. A similar presentation focused more on tools and best practices related to affordable housing was delivered as part of a panel on Gentrification and Mixed Income Housing moderated by Reconnecting America at the October 2008 Railvolution Conference in San Francisco, and is available upon request. The presentation distinguishes the types of transit and TOD projects where equity and community benefits might be pursued, specific job benefits that can be captured, challenges, and case studies from the Denver experience.